Impact of translanguaging practices on vocabulary development: A study of primary grade Indian learners
Lina Mukhopadhyay, Vrishali K. Patil, Sankrithi Loganathan, Sabbah Qamri & Ianthi Maria Tsimpli
Language and Language Teaching 2025 Issue No. 27, 7-22.
Abstract
Purposeful use of learners’ home languages in multilingual ESL classrooms can offer multiple cognitive, and linguistic benefits. Translanguaging, a successfully emerging pedagogy in multilingual contexts, can help in achieving this. To derive the benefits of using home languages in English education, it is necessary for teachers to be trained in consciously using learners’ home language(s) through translanguaging. This pedagogy can support development of multilingual reading and vocabulary skills, prerequisites to school success. The present study explores the impact of translanguaging pedagogy to develop vocabulary skills while teaching reading in primary grade multilingual learners enrolled in government schools in Telangana, India. Four teachers from low-cost EMI government schools were trained and observed for teaching reading and using vocabulary in context tasks. The findings from two sources — teacher uptake in providing focussed vocabulary inputs and learner improved performance on the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) task — bear evidence of the positive impact of translanguaging training.
